Israel has heard these arguments before. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said, “Proportionality is not compared to the event, but to the threat, and the threat is bigger and wider than the captured soldiers.”

Israel is confronting a regional threat, she and the government argue, which begins with Iran and Syria and their proxy, Hezbollah, and stretches to the radical Islamic Palestinian group Hamas.

Nor does Israel deliberately single out civilians, she argued, as Hezbollah and Hamas do through rocket attacks and suicide bombings. Intent matters, she said.

But in Gaza and Lebanon, civilians are inevitably harmed when militants hide among them. And in Lebanon, she said, some of the dead may be civilians associated with Hezbollah, assisting it or storing its rockets.

“Terrorists use the population and live among them,” Ms. Livni said. “It’s difficult to target like a surgery. Unfortunately, civilians sometimes pay the price of giving shelter to terrorists.” Under pressure or not, she said, citing Israeli intelligence, many civilians in southern Lebanon have Katyusha and other rockets under their beds.

But this kind of talk I think I can live with:

“When you go to sleep with a missile,” she said, “you might find yourself waking up to another kind of missile.”

Those arguments leave Lebanese and Gazans cold.

Earth to Lebanese and Gazans: she was using "missile" as a metaphor for penises.

News reports have been typically saying there's 25,000 Americans in Lebanon, a population of about 3.8 million people. Were similar proportions of Americans to be living in China, there'd be more than 657,000 Americans in China, and another similar number would be living in India, or almost 1 of every 200 Americans in those countries. Which leads me to wonder: how many of those Americans in Lebanon are, you know, spies?